My 6 month anniversary of working at Automattic was just a few days ago on January 14th.
I had started this post that day, but surprisingly, I found it very hard to come up with the words to describe what I think and feel about working at Automattic.
But, now I’ve had a few days to think about what to say, and here are a few topics I’d like to talk about to give you a better idea about what working at Automattic means to me.
My Team
The thing I truly love the most about working at Automattic is Team Mercury.
Mercury has recently grown as of a week ago, so for the first part of this, let’s consider the team members that went to Rome.
- Beau Lebens
- Allen Snook
- Jennifer Dodd
- Kevin Conboy
- Oguz Kocer
Even though we work primarily through text, I catch myself laughing out loud randomly throughout the day.
I also have a huge amount of respect for each one of them, and in some way, each one of them has taught me something in the past 6 months. Sometimes I catch myself feeling like I’m the dumbest one on the team — which is a great place to be in and learn.
Recently we took on a few other members from another team, including:
- Enej Bajgoric
- Michael Arestad
- Miguel Lezama
- Rocco Tripaldi
While I’ve only been working with this second group of team members for about a week, I feel like they bring a lot to the team in terms of knowledge and personality. So, it’ll be great to get to know them better over the next several months.
Typical Work Day
I’m not sure that I have a true “typical” work day, but one day of work might look something a bit like this for me:
- Wake up between 8:30 – 9:30
- Start looking at posts/messages/Slack/etc. to catch up on previous day/night stuff
- Be at coffee shop some time between 10 and 11 am at the latest
- Watercooler with team mates as well as replying to messages/posts/Slack messages
- Start programming at about 11:30
- Take a break between 2-3 pm and head to Mom’s or home to keep working. (I’ve found that a change of scenery really helps when working on tough problems that are frustrating me)
- Work until about 5:30 pm when I pick up Hero from the Boys and Girls club
- Figure out dinner and then program a few more hours starting at 7-8 pm
Interestingly, I have no clue how many hours a week that I work, and these times above are really just guesses. I don’t often think much about how many hours I’m working. Instead, I set a goal(s) for the day and try to achieve that.
Ultimately, my daily work schedule is very flexible and changes through the day to fit in my life. Note that I said that the work schedule fits in my life, instead of the opposite where people try to fit their lives into their work schedules.
Travel
I think that travel is the best perk of working at Automattic. As linked in my 2014 review post, here are the places that I traveled to for work.
Leave a Reply